Shortly after I graduated from college, I switched from Arch to Ubuntu and it was a bigger step in growing up than getting my actual diploma
Now, don't put Arch on your servers either because there's no real security story for Arch, but in that time I have learned tons about systemd, and you can't put a price on that.
- Knowing what happens if I have the audacity to update my computer without reading 3 different forum threads
- Understanding how to fix hilariously bad font rendering issues in a terminal, a software paradigm that's almost as old as computers themselves
- Tempering expectations that incredibly obscure apps like "Spotify" will "just work".
I think to imply Arch teaches much beyond the skills needed to deal with Arch Linux is a tenuous premise at best.
Agreed on the fonts, that has always been a pain. That being said, I recently installed Arch on a new laptop and the fonts weren't too bad out of the box - times change.
I update at least twice a week and I've only had one breakage in 3 years - I didn't update a config file with some new settings.
All in all, your response comes across a little FUDdy IMO.
Honestly, I don't understand what makes Arch so special.
I have mostly learned things on Ubuntu and I can use Arch just fine, and I think I have a decent understanding how things work.
Really, I think there is nothing fundamentally different across these distributions technically speaking.
Their biggest differences lie in their package and release management and policies (and, agreed, this is huge).
I'm not sure what skill you would learn on Arch and not on Ubuntu. It seems some vocal Arch users are lying to themselves and to the rest of the world about this.
Gentoo (or LFS) might probably be more educational, but I haven't used Gentoo enough, and haven't tried LFS enough to say.
(Kudos for Arch's documentation though, useful even when using another distro)
I don't particularly care for the whole DIY aspect. I spend enough time tinkering with Emacs and other tools that I don't want to waste any time on configuring/tweaking the OS itself. The different Manjaro versions are pretty decent (currently using the Awesome WM one), and I really like the Manjaro CLI installer (manjaro-architect) if I want a bit more control over my installation.
I think that archlinuxs advantage is that it's minimalistic, the philosophy is simple, you know what is running on your computer and generally why.
Tinkering with arch itself isn't that time consuming because the package management is so incredibly good, along with the AUR and wiki. These are invaluable.
I really do think the difficulty is overhyped though, it's really not hard at all.
On the Asus Nvidia updates broke my Windows manager on Ubuntu it not happen with Arch.
The Arch install is a little bit more complex but you can do exactly what you want which was for me: use systemd boot instead of grub, and cipher only the home partition.
Once the setup is done, I did not have any issue, fiddling to be done.
For me where I lost time on Linux was when I tried to customize my desktop environment to my liking with i3/polybar/etc. Now I just run Gnome3 on Wayland, far from perfect but it is a good compromise TBH between setup ease/integrated UI components and features.